


The Scent of Memory

by Annabel7



Category: Peter Pan (2003), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: F/M, Its not techicaly a relationship, Jazz Age, Ten Years Later, Wendy is 22, that specific brand of post-university ennui
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7
Summary: After fighting the idea that she had to grow up, Wendy Darling is half cynical and half dreamy, and fits nowhere. Between the wars she wanders London, an adult on the outside and something Else on the inside. One night she runs into a stranger.
Relationships: Wendy Darling/James Hook
Comments: 14
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I opted to set this in 1922, ten years after the book's release rather than when play premiered. Michael technically wouldnt have been old enough to join to RAF's first class but I wanted him to fly.

The boy who could fly, I laughed quietly into the flute. Tiny golden bubbles, fairy dust, tickle across my lips and tongue and promise some ghost of what I had walked away from.

No more flying, now that you’re grown. Now you have sex, suffrage, and spirits.

What a trade off to grow old and taste the clammy touches of drunken lovers, and be told your voice will make a difference in a government that only cared to give you such a limited voice in the first place after years of begging.

I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind when I no longer could fit into my old nightgowns because my breasts had made them hang strangely on my frame, my shoulders had gotten wider than the fashion, my hips too. Still, I was wearing sequins here at a dance hall on a Saturday night, while some swain makes a vain attempt to console me of a wound that had been tidily closed up until he saw fit to prod at it.

“Really. I’m sure he would have found it to be an honor.”

“I’m sure Michael would have much rather lived to fly for fun again.”

They never sent him home. His plane vanished over No Man’s Land.

Even that was funny, wasn’t it? I couldn’t explain that to the intentioned man in front of me. Not _well_ intentioned, no, because that would mean he was here to distract me into a dance, and then never remember my name. His intentions (for they were there) were purely for his own benefit, though I was sure in his ego he must have had a distinct sense that I would enjoy it too.

No Man’s Land. A war so absurd that we had devolved into naming parts of the fields like children’s stories. Michael who took to flying better than John ever did (or myself, if I was honest) had fallen to the earth like a meteorite in the dark.

“Again?”

“What?”

“You said: he would fly for fun again. I thought he was part of the RAF’s first class?”

“Oh—Oh, he _was_ , but he did so enjoy training maneuvers—he had written to me once that he had hoped to one day have his own plane and truly fly for the joy of it rather than knowing that once he landed he would be that much closer to the battle.” Not a word of it true.

Michael signed on the second that he knew he could get a chance to fly again. His duty to king and country, and a chance to catch some glimpse of what we had all tried so hard to capture a taste of ever since we were children. John had gone flying just the once, on his last real moment of joy before adulthood truly wrecked his spirit. People think Michael’s death hit him harder than it did me, or the fret of war and economy had stressed him so, but it was growing up that wrecked him. It never really wrecked Michael (did it ever have the chance?) but it destroyed John’s spirit so deeply that I wondered if he was a changeling, a miserable automata shell left in his place and the real John was climbing trees with a native princess, and setting traps for pirates, still barely eleven and living in a land where you can swim in a warm lagoon and throw snowballs all in the same span of a day.

My brother is a bank manager at the same fine establishment where our father started as a clerk.

My suitor hadn’t walked away yet. He was still prattling on about his brother, who lost a leg in Verdun, and how he still has—and he admitted this softly, with all the intonation of a lie—nightmares sometimes about the things he saw in France working as a medic.

Lord save me from _boys_.

Not a _boy_ , he’s grown, same as John, but there is a lack of something human in them at this age. They are not yet old enough to understand their own heads, and lack any kind of interior story, of an interior _self_ , and I desperately wanted to try to go to Paris because they say all the men in Paris are artists and I’m so _tired_ of these boys with no feelings, no hearts, masquerading with their height as grown men.

Then again. Another sip of the bubbling gold. I hadn’t found the men too full of feeling either. A professor with sandy hair and blue eyes, and a sharp smile who was so kind; he spoke with words bookended by scraps of poetry and invited me to the park for tea. He was no longer so kind when instead of leaning into his kiss I pulled away, wondering about the picture on his desk of a stern-faced woman and a trio of matching young boys, _I just wanted to feel something_. His big hands around my wrists, as he implored me not to make a scene in front of other picnickers.

Alcohol doesn’t make me feel like I can fly; contrary to what I had been promised, I feel all the more trapped on the ground. I can’t very well imagine that sex would be much better. Clarissa’s sweet pecking kisses when she was drunk enough to say she was doing it as a joke didn’t quite feel like flying either. I moved a few blocks north and marveled how small the circles in the city were, that I had never seen her again. How strange! London is a wonderfully walkable city, and I have walked from West Minster to Milbank in an afternoon just to see things and people. Sherlock Holmes did it! And everyone marveled to him that he knew the city _so well_. I could find my way around this town _blindfolded_. But no one ever bothers to leave their beaten paths.

I have a feather in my hair, all the style, in rhinestone headband, and this dress glimmers like pirate treasure in moonlight.

It’s funny, looking at this crowd and thinking that I’m older than half of them, getting older yet. I can’t tell if I’m wiser than them, or not yet grown up on the inside. I fought it so hard, for so long. I thought Peter might have come back a few more times, I told all the stories he loved to hear, I told stories about him, I made up new ones about him, some love stories and some not, but now I’m far too old to love him. Yet I still do. It’s not the same, not at all, but some corner of my heart still holds a twelve year old me who adores him. The memory of a first love, first kiss, my special kiss that Aunt Millicent swore you can only give once.

The fellow next to me was _still_ rambling.

“Want to ditch this place?” I asked, looking him up and down.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

“Once I—I mean, I had a _friend_ who knew… this girl who wanted to do things like this, but the most interesting it ever came to was the library,” he shuddered trying to push through a spider web. “I like…dark things. Do you?”

He does not like dark things. St. Paul’s little exterior cemetery at night smells like lavender and the soapy white roses that grow mostly wild nowadays. At night, it becomes a dreamland, and I’m always half hoping to trip into a rabbit hole or a grave when I’m down here. Once I was caught, when I was fifteen, and the officer warned me that if I was just a bit older, I would have gotten in far more trouble. Since then, I only explore places like this with people whom I know won’t be faster than me when escaping.

“Have to be honest,” he said, not waiting for my answer, “This isn’t where I thought we’d be going. There’s a bench over here we could use?”

“Use for what? I’m looking for fairies.”

“Why out here? That dance hall must have had a half dozen of them,” he laughed at his own rude joke, as if that would make it funny. I didn’t even know his name, but led him carefully farther behind the gate with the bad lock, but not so far someone would catch _me_ without getting sights on him first.

“They like places where the Clumsies don’t go,”

“The what?”

“Humans. Grown up humans.”

“Wendy they all said you were a strange bird, but—“

“ _Quiet_!” I could almost hear it. Something like bells and birds and all the warmth you’ve forgotten about childhood’s small moments—things I could catch ghosts of in the joy of a new book, of the sound of my new shoes clicking on the pavement like pirate boots, of the feather in my headband getting caught in the rose branches like my long hair did all those _years_ ago—

“Wendy, I think someone’s following us—“

“It’s just the night watch,”

“We’re going to get caught!”

“Have you no sense of adventure!”

“I’ve had bloody enough of it in France! Adventure isn’t—“

“ _War_ isn’t adventure.” I could feel it. The sound, the smell, there it was that other world feeling that I could get when I was close enough to a fairy—it was _so close_ , I could chase it, run for it, and true I never managed to catch one, but just getting near one was enough to feel for one _second_ the elation and joy that I haven’t known since—

“My purse. Oh my God.”

I hate being an adult. Not true; I have my freedoms, more than I did as a child, but all the _worries_. My money and my tickets for the bus and the Underground, _my notebook_. Oh, and the keys to my flat. Those were important too.

“We do have to go back, oh my God— _my keys._ ”

“I’ll walk you back to the hall, but I’m going home. I think I stepped in something.”

“Wipe your shoes at the door before going inside again. You don’t want to track ghosts into your house.”

* * *

The music hit us before the smell of cigarettes and sweat and synthetic perfumes. The door swung open to let a very drunk and rowdy group of friends loose into the night. I so badly wanted to follow them—I’ve tried that before, attaching myself to groups I was barely in. It always left me half alive with their own vibrancy and half dead from the knowledge that I do not share their histories or camaraderie, and I belong with no one and nowhere, and never will.

“I left it in my coat—“ I said, half to myself, I didn’t think my intrepid medic was really going to follow me in, but he must have forgotten, or seen a pretty girl and wanted to try to salvage his night.

“You forgot your coat too?” he accused, sounding so much like my father I wanted to stomp away.

“I—I guess I did?” I wasn’t _forgetful_ , but sometimes things just weren’t important where you were going next. Like remembering shoes to go on an adventure. Or the sound of voice of the first boy you kissed. Or Michael leaving his bear in the nursery when he left right from home for the training fields.

I pushed my way through the crowds to the coatroom, I couldn’t stand the not knowing part of forgetting things. I couldn’t stand the worry, even though I knew everything in it was an easy fix, it wouldn’t drain my account to get new tickets, a new lock on the door of my flat but—

“You were wearing the scarlet coat, Miss?”

“Er—“

The man was older than most of the crowd, black hair curling, longer and more unruly than the fashion prescribed. He had a real mustache instead of the awful bristles that were so popular, and a tidy beard. There was a look of feeling in his eyes that didn’t belong in a place like this.

“I was—I didn’t think there was a…”

“Oh, I’m not taking the coats. I only saw you rush out of here without yours, and in this weather I was sure that you would return for it. So, to avoid anyone confusing your lovely garment with their own, I thought I’d stand guard, remind any young lady who tried that it was _not_ the color she arrived in.”

“I—Thanks,” it was protective, but I didn’t like being noticed. Not when I wasn’t doing anything to be noticed on purpose. “You have a good memory.”

“I don’t really, only that I once had a coat in the same color. Have a good night.”

Men don’t do things without wanting something in return. They’re always thinking a step ahead. Boys did things because they wanted to do them. Men did them because they wanted to _get_ something.

“So. Want to get out of here?”

“Didn’t you come here with someone?”

“No, just went out for some air…and honestly, losing him will be the best part of my evening. Week. Year.”

“Haven’t we all known people like that?””

It made me smile for a moment while I tugged my coat on, the double row of buttons made it look a little bit Enlightenment, a little bit like a costume, but not so much that I would get stares in public.

“I haven’t seen you at any of the halls before,” I said, bitter, forced small talk that made me immediately want to run.

“I’ve been abroad. Curious about some of my old…haunts. I’m too old for things like this.”

“Funny isn’t it? When you can’t go back to where you’ve been, even when you’re there.”

“I wouldn’t call it _funny_ ,” he looked over his shoulder to me again, and the light made me think of something—

Something I had forgotten. Something I knew…that I knew once, but _forgot_.

“Maybe not,” I said, “Same story as usual?”

He smiled, and held out his left hand instead of the right, making me look. I didn’t flinch when I saw it was gone: the war had left a generation half dead, and of the half that returned another bunch yet were broken inside and out. I shook his hand with the kind of unladylike tight grip that had saved me from several unpleasant dates.

“France too?”

“Farther than that, actually.”

“I won’t waste pleasantries on telling you that I’m sorry,”

“But you still said it. Polite of you.”

“I was actually—I was leaving but—well, you’re very strange and I—I don’t mean it as…Are you in London for a while?”

“Until I find a few things, yes.”

“I’ve had enough fun for the night, but—“ It’s been a few weeks since I had actually gone on a real date, with a friend or otherwise, and the man who stood off to the side to stand guard over a lady’s coat was…well, I don’t think he was looking to take me home.

“I had plans actually, to accompany a fine lady to Kew Gardens to see the flowers.”

“Does the fine lady have a name?” he really was older than I thought, if he was trying _that_.

“You tell me,” and then he either said “Wendy Darling,” or “Wendy, darling,” and I never did learn which it was.

“How did you—“

“I heard your friend say it earlier. I don’t blame you for not seeing me. I’m used to being a bit of a—shadow.”

“Well. I’m willing to rearrange my busy schedule, and as long as no one took the tickets out of my purse while I was gone…”

“I can meet you at the station?”

“I’ll meet you at the gardens. Noon?”

He nodded, he was still holding my hand and raised it; he kissed the air above it. Quite old fashioned, I wanted to tease, but he was older—just how older I wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t an unsettling gesture until I heard him sniff.

“Honeysuckle, and real too,”

“Er, thank you,” I had forgotten that I had put perfume on my wrists. Honeysuckle grew wild on that island and you could almost taste it in the air, and I loved having a cloud of it close to my skin.

“Until then,” he bowed his head slightly, and walked off.


	2. Chapter 2

The walk from my flat to the Underground station was green, even in the early fall. There’s not an overabundance of it in the city, but there _are_ enough overgrown gardens, hedges, and lots to give some semblance of the verdant on my block.

I miss the jungles and the forests most of all.

Along the way I always ran my hand compulsorily across the iron gates, my fingers smacking almost painfully against each bar. There was always a hop to my step when I was in a good mood, and I was in a fantastic one that morning. I woke up early, naturally even though I am not a morning person and never really was. I had made myself tea and had a hard-boiled egg for breakfast—I’m terrible at frying them without burning them, and I only had it because I knew that I had to eat _something_ other than the frosted biscuits I helped myself to with the tea.

No one at my flat to tell me to eat my sausage and beans meant that I could eat whatever I wanted, and I often had a pastry on my way out the door if anything at all for breakfast.

I had dressed early, slipped on stockings and oxfords, a skirt and jumper, and took the risk of the rather masculine fedora that I had bought with my last bonus at work. Work…wasting my degree as a salesgirl at Herrod’s, selling jewelry. At least the gold reminds me of pixies and pirates….

I had a messenger bag at the time that I used to use for school and then for college, and in it went my tickets, keys, money, wallet, and an apple in case the date went too terribly. The condoms that Clarissa had bought me before my first date with the professor stayed in their grave in my trunk. I had no interest in that sort of thing, and besides. The man was handsome, enough to make me interested, but not quite enough to keep me up at night with wanting. The old-fashioned hair above his shoulders, and the cut of his jacket gave him enough devil-may-care that the RAF boys always did, but his voice was calming. Logical, if a voice could have that attribute as a sound. Eyes as blue as—

I tripped over an uneven space in the sidewalk and tore my stockings.

\-- _with eyes as blue as forget-me-nots_.

I _forgot_. I had _forgotten_. I didn’t forget _him_ , no—not the cruelty, not the fear, not the horror of the crocodile’s jaws snapping shut around—

He was dead. He was dead and I played as sure of a role in it as Peter did.

I couldn’t keep letting some hallucinatory dream rule over my life. That’s all it was. That’s all it could be. But my parents never wanted to talk about it, and John insisted we were all having the same dreams back then because of my stories. But I never told stories about Peter Pan until _after_. Until _after_ …

No. It was real. I have seen fairies in parks and cemeteries. There is magic in this world, there is magic beyond this world, and it is _reachable_.

But I reminded myself that the man I met at the party was a soldier back home for the first time, and I was a young woman who was going to make him feel less alone for an afternoon. And…it felt nice to have someone who wanted me around. I was a type of pretty, young, and strange, and men slightly older than me tended to gravitate towards my smile and treat my oddness at the shop as an invitation.

Usually they were bored husbands, but sometimes they would be men who came in for a gift for their mother or sister, and I would go with them. Tea, coffee, sometimes lunch. Soldiers or rich men, but they all grew bored me so quickly. Oh of course there were some that I adored…but I wasn’t in possession of the type of personality that really made people want to stay around.

I was too excitable and wide-eyed, and made childish observations. I was easily distracted and the real world did little more than depress me.

I was an adult, but only in appearance, in title. Really, I was the same girl, playing a role.

I never got the man’s _name_ , I thought, and as I rode the Underground to the bus station outside the first zone. I watched the people instead of reading. The trip was _just_ too long and too different from my usual ride to work to focus on a book.

The bus ride was different. I pulled out a volume of Alexander Pope _,_ and tried to read but the view out the window, however familiar, distracted me as it always did every few lines.

Kew Gardens was a short ride, only half an hour, and I had been there before. Really I wasn’t sure _where_ the man intended to meet me, seeing how sprawling it was (and that I was quite early, I noted on my father’s old pocket watch). Beyond the north gate I wandered inward, gravitating towards the lake as I had done in my previous two visits. Kensington was where I usually ended up, but Kew was fine too. They had the massive green houses there, and I hadn’t ever been in to see the orchids—last time the line had been too long.

Despite my bag, I carried Pope in my hands to give them something to do other than touch the plants. It was frowned upon, and I was more likely than not to be thrown out of the gardens for picking a flower from the grass. It was the only thing I didn’t care for in places like this. Why—in St. James’s park I could sit in the grass and weave flowering clover into chains while my friends each read aloud a paragraph of homework until it was my turn.

It had been strange, those days—I was no longer the oldest, nor the only girl, and the requirement of me to be mother-while-mother-is-gone had vanished. Don’t think I was adverse to being _a_ mother, I had assumed the future held children for me as it does most women, but telling stories to my own children, and the thought of raising them bright and vibrant, full of sword fights and tree climbing was much different than being expected to be a caregiver to every younger family member or friend that crossed my path.

Some of the trees down by the lake were turning fiery orange, and I shrugged my shoulders in a deep sigh. I would wander out there alone, read my book, eat my apple, and walk back to the bus stop. Maybe someone was selling candied chestnuts somewhere, it was _almost_ cool enough, and in tourist areas they even sold them in the summer now.

“Wendy?”

He looked calm and normal. That’s what I’ll always remember: he looked ordinary and safe. A crisp jacket laid over his arm, a buttoned shirt, a loose tie, pressed trousers, and some kind of reptile skin boots. A touch eccentric, or else dreadfully out of touch with the look of the day, but I could have easily passed him in a crowd. I didn’t know why I was so bothered, but I _was_ much more aware of the torn stockings.

“I never asked which gate to meet at—I didn’t think I’d find you—and I never even asked for your name, I felt terrible.”

“You’re forgiven. As for my name, I _am_ English, so it’s John, Henry, James, or George.”

“James.”

“Did you overhear the woman at the gate read my ticket?”

“No. Actually, I guessed. My father is George, and so is my boss. My brother is John and so is my old roommate’s fiancé. The names are all common, but they do tend to balance out.”

“Why not Henry?”

“I spent my entire final semester buried in Shakespeare. I quite liked his histories, but I’m so tired of the name Henry. I never want to hear it again,” I gave him a look of faux consideration. “If your name was Henry, I’d have to rename you.”

He gestured for me to walk ahead of him as the path towards the lake narrowed. I was grateful he didn’t offer his arm, as I was still trying to find something in his face to repulse me for the memory of— _forget-me-nots_. But blue eyes are not uncommon, and in this sunlight, even my own plain color might look brilliant.

The only downside I saw was that he was older than me. Not shockingly so, no, and with so few young men left in London after the war, I saw worse matches every day. Regardless of the median age of eligible men, I did prefer proper grown men to ones my age, but I had always assumed when I’d be serious about one I too would be that age. But then and there I wasn’t serious, I only liked the fact that someone had witnessed my awkwardness and found it charming instead of off-putting. I had fallen in love before like a bridge collapsing, mistaking the feeling of falling for the feeling of flying, and if I were ever to love someone again, I didn’t wonder if maybe a slower growing fire would be better.

“You’re fond of Shakespeare then?”

“Oh yes, I love the tragedies, but my favorite is always _The Tempest_.”

“A love story?”

“Not really,” I defended it, casually as I could without exposing just how far I would go to stand up for it if he were to try and argue.

“A boy washes up on the shore of a strange island, and falls in love with a girl? Never mind the weak usurpation plot and hasty mockery of colonization, it is, at it’s core, a vehicle for a love story between otherwise strangers, in a strange land.”

“Yes but there’s so much more to it than—“ I couldn’t. I could allude to Neverland to the end of the night but exposing too much of my own love story dragged my heart low, and made me feel silly and pining. “I do enjoy _King Lear_ too. And _Much Ado About Nothing_. You?”

“ _Richard III_.” He answered almost too quickly.

“Now that one I couldn’t. I found him alluring, alarmingly so, but when the boys were murdered—it stopped being fun.”

“I don’t think it was ever meant to be fun. It _is_ considered one of the tragedies, after all. It’s in the title. _The Tragedy of Richard III._ ”

“Did you read them in school?”

“Most of them. We read more of history back then, if you forgive me for dating myself: English literature wasn’t exactly a study yet.”

“Did you learn the Classics instead?”

“ _Ita vero,_ ”

“I preferred Latin,” I said. “I didn’t start learning Greek young enough to understand it.”

“Neither did I, grammar schools aren’t hard enough on students. No, no, I had my Homer caned into my hands at Eton,”

“ _Eton_?” Even if they allowed girls, my family wouldn’t have been able to afford to send me there for a day. Even his mention of canes didn’t detract from the envy in my voice.

“I had…a unique family situation. A father who didn’t live in our household had insisted I would be sent there if it kept my mother and I quiet.”

“I wanted to go to Cambridge, but I couldn’t afford it.”

“Which college, might I ask?”

“King’s,” I didn’t want to waste any more thought on it. I attended St. Mary’s of London instead, and hated how close it was to home for every second.

He nodded towards the book in my arms, “Isn’t that where Pope went?”

“They had a good Latin program. It was only a coincidence that this is the book I brought with me for the bus ride, but he wrote a line about this place once that—“

“’’I am his Highness’s dog at Kew, pray tell sir, _whose dog are you_?’”

“Did you know he actually _did_ write the couplet on a collar of a puppy he gifted to the Prince of Wales?” I didn’t make him laugh, or stare in wonder at my knowledge, but at least he didn’t look bored.

“I know less biographical detail. Personal histories weren’t something that intrigued scholars in my day either,”

“You talk as if you’re positively _ancient_.”

“You wouldn’t accuse me, rightfully so, of being…old then?”

_“…Done for.” CRACK. The crocodile’s jaws didn’t close with a snap, but a crack like lightning. A beast the size of the dinosaurs we saw at the Natural History Museum._

“I haven’t called you old before, have I?” I knew it wasn’t him. He didn’t look hardly anything at all like him anyway. And he was dead. The dark figure of my nightmares didn’t have…laugh lines; _he_ looked dangerous, not intelligent, not bold. At least, not in the way that my date looked bold.

“You have called me old, but I don’t think you noticed or remembered, or meant it more than mocking.” He didn’t look insulted, only…amused. I wasn’t used to people looking at me like that and it was _unnerving_. I didn’t grow up right; I didn’t know social cues or when to stop talking, and I had ink stains on _everything_ I owned and—

“Well. Maybe I meant it at the time, but I wouldn’t be so rude to you now. I’ve grown kinder, perhaps too kind for my own good.”

What was I doing? I was half talking to this kind man who seemed, against all reason, to genuinely like me, to be sympathetic to me at the least, and half talking as I did sometimes when alone—

Alone, when I could pretend that I was still twelve, and I would hold a sword (umbrella, fire poker) or a dagger (my carving knife) and parry against invisible foes. I comforted myself with the knowledge that the Bronte sisters had their Gondal: imaginary lives and places, imaginary friends and lovers too. It made me feel less absurd, that while my writing was nowhere near their quality, that I was not the only mistake-of-an-adult of my kind.

“I remain convinced that people do not undergo some change from one being into another when they grow. You are yourself, and what traits you cultivate or allow to weaken do not make you a different person. You are the same woman I met last night, and the same person you were ten years ago.”

“Are you?” I asked far too sharply, “The same person that you were ten years ago?”

“Oh, no, no, no, of _course_ not.”

“Then that goes against what you just—“

“I’m a much worse person now.”

It made me laugh. _He_ made me laugh. We were walking along dying flowers and changing trees, and we were both _laughing_. It was the most mundane thing in the whole world and some part of me was angry about it.

Still, I knew that he was wrong about changing. I knew that my child-self still lived inside my heart somewhere and she was furious that I was charmed by some ordinary soldier on some ordinary date in ordinary London instead out seeking out bold new horizons, a totally different person than I had been then. Perhaps John wasn’t the only one of us replaced by some hollow excuse for a person.

“I think I’ve become more boring,” I said, my laughter finally subsiding.

“Do you?”

“I used to tell stories. I used to want to write them, be a famous novelist, but…the world doesn’t want more violence, no one cares about love, and I haven’t had enough adventure to write one.”

“You’ll find that mankind never has enough violence to be satisfied, and I’d argue that most people care about love stories, even if they don’t advertise that opinion. Having adventures…Surely you’ve had at least _one_ adventure in your life?”

“I—I’ve had _one_. I went to an island when I was a girl. But I need _experience_ to write a novel, and I—“

“Do you think Captain Johnson knew a single bloody thing about the lives of the pirates he wrote about? About the men and women he professed to have known?”

“Actually I think it was Daniel Defoe using a penname…so no, I don’t think he really knew anything at all about sailing or pirates other than what he read in newspapers.”

“But I can still waltz into any bookstore on the Strand and ask for a copy, and they’ll hand me one. You don’t need to know things, you only need to know how to lie.”

“I’d rather write books that tell some sort of _truth_ …Besides, right now girls my age are all obsessed with the Claudine series. Realism is what sells now, realism or absurdity. No one wants adventure anymore.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Do you want still want adventure?”

“Well, of _course_ I do, ardently, but—“

“Do you think that makes you somehow unique; that you’re the only person in the empire who wants something beyond the shoreline? People would read fresh adventures, and they always will. After all, they’ve been reading the same dozen or so for the past _hundred_ years. I should know.”

“If the sun wasn’t out, I’d think you were a vampire, like Stoker’s novel.”

“I’ve been accused of looking a touch like Charles II, but Dracula? That’s a first.”

“I didn’t mean your appearance, I meant— you keep talking about older things, as if you were _there_. But you can’t be more than forty.”

At some point, we had sat down along the bank of the lake, and I didn’t notice until that moment, and only because my leg was falling asleep from being bent under me to hide the run in my stockings. There’s something like a smile on his face.

John always hated that phrase of mine, ‘something like a smile,’ and so did my professors, but I maintain and will until I die, that a true smile is neither practiced nor precise, it must happen without planning, and be knowingly maintained through the love of knowing you’re expressing joy to someone. A true smile is as hard to find as my mother’s kiss.

“You’re very young.”

“Three and twenty, almost. Hardly young.”

He unfolded his jacket and laid it on the ground behind me, so I could recline if I wished. I didn’t, but I leaned back on my elbows just slightly as to be polite.

Distantly I wondered when he lost that hand, as he seemed quite practiced in moving without it. I couldn’t imagine having to make such an adjustment to my life. True, I hand-write most things, but the typewriter can actually keep up with my thoughts in a way that my hands cannot, and makes my head hurt far less when I’m trying to commit any of my thousands of wandering, unruly thoughts into something that resembles a story.

I combed my fingers through the clipped grass and came upon a pebble. Impulse took over and I skipped it hard as I could over the lake, and almost hit a lazily floating swan.

James cackled at it’s panicked honking.

“Never would have thought you were such a marksman, Maid Marion,”

The shock of almost offending the wildlife made me clap both my hands to my mouth, but his laughter made me laugh even if it wasn’t all that funny.

“A friend of mine taught me how to throw like that, to make them skip farther than if you just gently toss them,” I did this quite a lot throughout my early adulthood: casual mentions of Peter and my adventures, sly and sneaking, knowing that no one would ever know exactly what I was getting at, and feeling a sense of secret mirth for it.

“You’re smiling,”

“Not really. Not a true smile.”

“Was this friend a handsome boy? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“It was, oh, ten years ago? It was far away, on holiday. Things felt…like a dream while I was there. You have no competitor but memory.”

“He must have made quite the impression on you, either that or the locale was unique.”

_Why must he keep talking like this?_ I figured it was because he was so clearly well traveled and well learned, that he caught all the little flecks of glittering fairy dust I let slip into my stories and conversation. He must have made the connection, between my island visit and the boy I met on holiday. It wouldn’t be difficult to do if he was actually _listening_ to me, which I was starting to hope he was.

Maybe I wasn’t so secretive and clever, now that I think about it. Maybe it was only that people never listened close enough to hear the bells.

“I’m sure you understand from your own travels, sir.”

“James. My men called me ‘sir.’ ”

“I’m sure you understand, _James,_ that sometimes when you’re in a strange place all matter of ordinary moments—hide and seek, telling stories, skipping stones—all become part of the adventure.”

He considered it, found a rock in the grass too, and skipped it not-quite-expertly. It came so close to hitting a duck I wonder if he didn’t do it on purpose.

“A long time ago I knew a youth, and he was invariably charmed by a rather plain English girl. I could never figure out exactly _why_ out of all his rotating playmates that it was _she_ who finally got to him, but he picked her up in London, and well… It must have felt—grown up to him, and therefore exciting and new to lift a girl from the city in the dead of night. Though I doubt he ever would have thought of it that way.”

I forced myself to imagine story details to fill his anecdote that were as far from my own tale as possible. I had to stop this. I was sitting in the grass on a handsome man’s jacket in the late summer sun. I was so far from then and there and _him_ , and James kept shifting more towards me, his left hand now resting on his knee as if he was slowly working up the courage to find my own with it.

“All the places I’ve been,” he said, “And I still feel something akin to nostalgia for _here_.”

“It’s the scent for me; the lake, the greens, the cut grass. Roses—“ dying roses giving off a perfume just before they decay into a moldering stink didn’t sound romantic, and as the sun began to droop, I had to admit to myself I was hoping this was getting romantic, “Roses slowly confessing their own mortality,”

“ _I do like that_ , you must be magic with a pen,” he said. It was almost dark. The tone was the first thing that made me think this wasn’t pure chivalry; that he might want to say things in that tone to me later, where no one could watch us. I shuddered. “Are you cold?”

“No. It’s still warm enough.”

“We could tour the greenhouses before they close for the afternoon?”

“I forgot! First I didn’t ask your name, and now that…I’m a terrible date. You wanted to come and see the flowers! And all this time I’ve been making miserable small talk and—“

“I wouldn’t say your small talk has left me _miserable_ , Wendy, darling.” Wendy, darling or Wendy Darling. I still don’t know what he meant, but I could feel an iron hook piercing my raw heart under my ribs.

I sat up quickly, and collected his jacket and my bag before offering him an arm up. He looked at it disdainfully and rose on his own.

“I didn’t mean to be rude. I would have offered anyone a hand.”

“You know what? I believe you.”

I caught a glimpse of his wrist—the cut was so clean I wondered if he had had a wound that had necropsied, and required an amputation instead of losing it to a shell or shrapnel.

This time, he offered me his arm as we headed towards the greenhouses in the center of the park, and I gladly took it.

I could barely stand it, to only hold onto his arm as he walked me through the rows and galleries of exotic blooms. I had thought that we were going to join a tour, but it wasn’t necessary: he knew most of the names of the flowers, and the ones he didn’t he described with a scientific flair that made me wonder if he had been a field artist before losing his hand.

A room full of tropical lilies, made me feel like I was suddenly shorter and lighter. There were great palms, brilliant golden flowers, a perfume somewhere between fruit and dreams hung in the air, and a plant with leaves green and scaled as a—

“Shame to ruin such a lovely gallery with these,” he said when he saw me stop to admire the strange, sprawling ferns.

“They look like the backs of little crocodiles; I think they’re charming.”

“I don’t care much for crocodiles. Alligators.”

I smiled, adults never liked ugly animals, and I was used to it. _You are an adult_ , child-me berated in the same tone she used when I forgot to set my alarm clock. _Some awful grown-up you turned out to be_.

“Really? I always found crocodiles amusing, up to a point at least.”

He leaned down—had he always been so much taller than me?—and said low at my ear, so close to my skin I thought I was about to get a kiss, and felt so warm, a flare of terrible excitement, a warmth I was so afraid he must be able to feel. He smelled like tobacco, vanilla, and oak, and my eyes shut sweetly, but only halfway, as I was unable to take the suspense even for something as fleeting as a smitten press of lips to my cheek.

“If you found that crocodile amusing then I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings that I split it’s belly open from the inside out. If your miserable flock of feral children stuck around another two minutes, you might have even gotten to watch.”

My body went from fire to frozen.

I was having another nightmare. I was having a nightmare, and I had learned to live with them for as rare as they became after I grew up. Hook will kill me, or do something to make I wish he only wanted to kill me, and then I will wake up, cry, sit under a cold shower and go to work with my legs crossed for the entire bus ride.

I opened my eyes, waited for his reply, because surely what I just heard only existed in my head, because surely this was wrong, Hook’s face in my head was so warped and aged and horrific, and his voice in my head was always so cruel, and I had just spent the afternoon considering how—

No further reply came. That was real, that had happened, James had said that, and I was—

I was running as fast as I had ever flown, far from the greenhouse to whatever gate I could reach first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the suspense. This is all still build up for a next part, which will be the one that I said was terribly personal for me. Thank you for sticking around <3

**Author's Note:**

> Posting this as complete even though it's just the set up for the rest, but the rest is so personal that I'm not sure I really want to share it.
> 
> UPDATE: there will be a part three.
> 
> Basically, I watched the movie after over a decade and a half avoiding it for various reasons. I used to have nightmares about Hook as a young girl, and he was THE villain of my childhood, the one that scared me the most--not that I found him scary, but the fact that he felt the most threatening despite the lack of magic. Then I watched the movie and instead of feeling nostalgic the whole time I kept gaping at Hook and felt like I betrayed the part of me that's still eleven and scared to pieces of him. 
> 
> I get that that's the /point/ but like. It's a lot.
> 
> Anyway, I'm predictable trash as ever for "Heroine runs into the villain ten years later," so who didn't see this coming?
> 
> PS: my memory of London back streets is a bit foggy, and I Absolutely Never looked for fairies after dark around St. Paul's but I hear it's very other worldly.


End file.
